All these rationalizations were easy in the moment itself, and indeed forgotten entirely in the rush of sexual sensation. But immediately upon completion of the act Sax began to worry again. Should he go back to his room, should he stay? Phyllis had fallen asleep with her hand on his flank, as if to assure herself that he would stay. In sleep everyone looked like a child. He surveyed the length of her body, shocked slightly once again by the various manifestations of sexual dimorphism. Breathing so calmly. Just to be wanted . . . her fingers, still tensed across his ribs. And so he stayed; but he did not sleep much.

3

Sax threw himself into the work on the glacier and the surrounding terrain. Phyllis went out in the field sometimes, but she was always discreet in her behavior with him; Sax doubted if Claire (or Jessica!) or anyone else realized what had happened— or realized that every few days, it was happening again. This was another complication; how would Lindholm react to Phyllis’s apparent desire for secrecy? But in the end it was not an issue. Lindholm was more or less forced, as a matter of chivalry or compliance or something like that, to act as Sax would have. And so they kept their affair to themselves, much as they would have in Underhill, or on the Ares, or in Antarctica. Old habits die hard.

And with the distraction of the glacier, it was easy enough to keep the affair secret. The ice and the ribbed land around it were fascinating environments, and there was a lot to study and try to understand out there.

The surface of the glacier proved to be extremely broken, as the literature had suggested— mixed with regolith during the flooding, and shot through with trapped carbonation bubbles. Rocks and boulders caught on the surface had melted the ice underneath them, and then it had refrozen around them, in a daily cycle that had left them all about two-thirds submerged. All the seracs, standing above the jumbled surface of the glacier like titanic dolmens, were on close inspection found to be deeply pitted. The ice was brittle because of the extreme cold, and slow to flow downhill because of the reduced gravity; nevertheless it was moving downstream, like a river in slow motion, and because its source was emptied, the whole mass would eventually end up on Vastitas Borealis. And signs of this movement could be found in the newly broken ice seen every day— new crevasses, fallen seracs, cracked bergs. These fresh surfaces were quickly covered by crystalline ice flowers, whose saltiness only added to the speed of crystallization.